


Niles's Wedding

by cattajonze



Category: The Monkees (Band), The Monkees (TV)
Genre: Mike's feelins, Mild Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:20:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21867397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cattajonze/pseuds/cattajonze
Summary: The Monkees attend Niles's wedding. Mike reflects on some past and present relationships.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 14





	Niles's Wedding

Mike squinted against the bright sunlight, feeling beads of sweat forming at his temples as the midday heat intensified. To his left and right, Micky and Davy were bobbing up and down like apples in a barrel, pointing out familiar faces as they filled the rows of seats behind them.

“There’s Mr. Babbit!” Micky announced.

“Why would he invite Mr. Babbit?” Davy gasped, staring incredulously.

“Maybe for the wedding gift?” Peter suggested.

“Then why’d he invite _us_?” Micky wondered.

It was strange to be at a wedding for someone his own age, Mike thought, but even stranger that the person was Niles, a perennially stoned and apparently deeply indifferent individual. When the invitation had arrived a week earlier, Mike had assumed it was a shotgun wedding, but now the elegant details of the beachfront ceremony— delicate flowers affixed with a matching-color ribbon to each row of chairs, mother-of-the-bride dressed in deep sea blue that matched the color of Niles’s tie (not to mention the fact that Niles was wearing a tie!)— suggested that the wedding had been a long time in the planning. It was more likely that Niles had simply dropped the ball on sending invitations. 

Mike had been to other weddings; of course, none of them were beach weddings planned by the well-to-do families of Los Angeles-area brides. Today, each observation brought on a new line of questioning, most of them ending with: _Why_ was _anyone_ marrying _Niles_?

“Oh it’s— uh oh.” Davy ducked down, tucking his head under Peter’s arm. “It’s Leslie.”

Micky threw himself to the ground in a theatrical panic. “Is she with General Vandenberg?”

“No,” Mike said, craning his neck. “It looks like Leslie’s with some new guy.”

Micky and Davy looked at each other, sighing with relief. A quartet near the wedding podium began to play ‘Here Comes the Bride,’ and Mike prodded Micky with his boot until Micky made his way, clumsily, back into his chair. 

When Mike had attended weddings as a child, his mother would begin to cry silently as soon as she saw the bride appear and would continue crying until the end of the ceremony. At some long-ago event, he could even remember his father putting an arm around her, a gesture Mike knew too well as an assertion of domineering control. His father was not an affectionate man. 

Though Peter and Davy were watching the bride, Micky seemed to be examining Niles with interest. Mike did not question why— Niles had a fresh haircut, and for the first time in two years, they could see his eyes. He was wearing a tuxedo, standing tall, with his gaze fixed placidly on his bride. The whole scene was very strange, Mike thought.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are gathered here today to celebrate the union of these two young people…” the minister began, his voice clear and sonorous above the crashing waves nearby. 

Mike had never given much thought to marriage, not in the abstract sense and not in the personal sense. But as the minister queried Niles’s bride: “Do you, Bethany, take Niles as your husband? Will you love him, comfort him, and keep him in sickness and in health?” and she responded with a sincere and joyful, “I do,” Mike felt his heart twist with some discordant emotion. 

“Why are you frowning?” Davy whispered as the minister announced Bethany and Niles as husband and wife.

With an effort, Mike raised his eyebrows to erase his expression. “I guess I was just thinking…”

Davy seemed to be waiting in earnest for him to continue his sentence, but the bride and groom walked by, bringing with them a wave of applause and cheers from all around, and thankfully, the moment was gone.

***

An hour later, Mike sat alone at a table watching Micky and Davy dance wildly amidst a crowd consisting mostly of Bethany and Niles’s young cousins and their mothers. He jumped when Peter pulled up a chair beside him. 

“What a nice wedding,” Peter said. “Everyone looks so happy.”

“Yeah,” Mike replied, hearing the tone of ambiguity in his own voice. Peter looked at him curiously, cocking his head to the side. “I guess I think marriage is kind of a drag,” he admitted.

It had been the vows that made him realize what his mother had been crying about all those years. Love, comfort, commitment— his mother had learned the hard way that these promises were too easy for a man to break. Men broke things, Mike knew. As brides ventured down the aisle, his mother must have seen women being marched toward jail sentences rather than happy partnerships.

“Me too,” Micky said, appearing out of nowhere with a plate piled high with wedding cake. “When I get married, it’s gonna be to someone cool. Not some ball and chain.” He said this with an air of misplaced confidence, as though none of them had ever seen him follow around a snobby, pretty girl like a puppy dog. 

“I’m never getting married,” Davy asserted, one-upping Micky as usual, his expression indignant. “Or at least not for a long, long, long—”

Micky rolled his eyes. “You almost married Ella May _last week_.”

“Oh yeah,” Davy said sheepishly. He grinned crookedly, laughing. “Well, it wasn’t my idea, was it?”

“What about you, Pete?” Micky asked. “Do you ever wanna get married?”

“I feel married to the universe,” Peter stated dreamily. 

“He’s married to the sky,” Davy added, gesturing grandly. “The birds are his wives, the breeze is his mistress.”

Micky, giggling through a large mouthful of cake, began coughing violently just as Niles’s best man took up the microphone to make a toast. Mike grabbed a glass of water and dragged Micky away from the wedding crowd to keep him from making a scene.

“That’ll teach you to inhale cake,” Mike said as Micky regained composure. “My dad would have whooped my ass for something like that.”

Micky blinked in surprise. “Really?”

 _Damnit, Mike._ The first rule of forgetting someone was never talking about them. A few memories escaped into his mind then, like the whoosh of carbonation from a newly opened soda bottle: indistinct shouting behind a closed door, punctuated by the sound of breaking glass; the clink of a belt unbuckling and a swish of leather as it was freed from belt loops; the sting of a beating; the ache of emptiness that had driven him far from home. 

“That’s how I turned out to be the fine, respectable man you know today,” Mike said with a small flourish to hide his awkwardness. Micky laughed halfheartedly and shrugged, willing to let it go, at least for now.

When they returned to the table, Micky’s plate of cake was gone, cleared away by a scrupulous caterer. Micky recruited Peter to locate a replacement, and the two disappeared into the catering tent.

Beside Mike, Davy was staring into a glass of water, swirling it with the straw. One of Davy’s least enviable qualities, in Mike’s opinion, was the way his expressive face betrayed everything he was feeling, so that even in profile, Mike could tell that he was worrying about something.

“What’s up?”

Davy shrugged, making a face.

“Come on, spit it out.”

Davy continued playing with the straw as he spoke. “Do you think we’re meant to be with just one person?”

Mike hesitated, unsure whether Davy was wondering about soulmates or asking permission to be polygamous. Venturing down either route seemed equally perilous.

“Because what if I’ve already met the person I’m supposed to be with, and I messed it up?” Davy looked up, his large eyes imploring Mike for a response.

Mike shook his head. “I don’t think that’s how it works, Dave.” Davy chewed on his thumbnail, unconvinced. Mike squeezed his shoulder. “I think one day you’ll meet some chick who won’t disappear after a week or a month or a year and then you’ll know it’s real.”

Davy glanced a few tables away, where Leslie was smiling broadly, her head thrown back with laughter over something her date had said.

“And don’t tell me you wish General Vandenberg was your father-in-law,” Mike added.

“No,” Davy grinned. “I guess you’re right.”

Mike looked at Niles and Bethany slow dancing as the sun set, their bodies interlocking, trusting, contented. It was impossible to imagine offbeat Niles as his violent father, and maybe it was equally impossible to imagine himself in that role. 

As the song neared its end, Mike watched Micky attack Davy with a plate full of cake, using his hand to smear frosting down the back of Davy’s neck. He watched Davy chase Micky down the beach, trailing pieces of cake, while Peter collapsed with laughter in the surf, oblivious to the waves that soaked his jeans. Mike felt a smile creep across his face, knowing he could run out to them, get them under control, but deciding he’d rather not.


End file.
